This year's winner of the Nobel prize for literature is the 87-year-old British novelist Doris Lessing, a hugely distinguished writer whose major work - including the seminal Golden Notebook - might realistically be thought to be behind her. Though, as Lessing herself noted earlier today, the possibility of this award has been mooted frequently over the last forty years, its timing has caused some surprise. After all, of what use will it be to Lessing - or, perhaps more importantly, to her work?

In Europe, the term "Nobelisable" is used freely to mean a writer who could perfectly well win the Nobel prize. Every small country has one - sometimes two. In Lithuania it's Tomas Venclova; in Estonia, Jaan Kaplinski and Jaan Kross; in Slovenia, Tomas Salamun and, perhaps, Drago Jancar. In contradistinction to the Anglo-American world, where the repositories of national culture - or at least of national debate - are often seen to be novelists, these figures are frequently poets. Poets automatically play a significant role in many of the continent's national narratives, where nation states came to being, or at least consciousness at the same time as they developed a national written language and literature. These national poets, in other words, are seen as not merely having enriched literary practice but, in doing so, as having engaged in the glorious struggle for sovereignty and freedom.

Writers are often identified as being Nobelisable for similar reasons. The Nobel prize carries an aura of the writer's life as a public one; of collective identity voiced, shaped or advocated by a visionary, perhaps even brave, individual. The writer as unacknowledged legislator, maybe, but nevertheless visibly engaged with their own society. There is something of this aura behind suggestions that the decision-making of the Nobel committee is "politicised". But maybe these suggestions have it back to front. Perhaps the Nobel prize, in so far as it honours the public effects of a writer's work, acknowledges the importance of big ideas. Perhaps it holds onto those twin notions - of the writer as thinker, rather than entertainer; of great writing as a matter of often-passionately-held ideas, rather than of style - which are so out of fashion in the Anglo-Saxon publishing world.

In this context, the award of this year's prize to Doris Lessing suddenly appears as a rich and subtle commentary on British culture since the 1960s and 70s. How has British society, it makes us ask ourselves, incorporated the egalitarian insights of those decades? Doris Lessing has remained, in an unfashionably essentialist way, a feminist writer: struggling to conceptualise what makes a woman's experience. That struggle, expressed in profoundly unorthodox genres - whether a painstaking record of daily consciousness or a fantasia on the impossibility of a man-free society - is necessary because Lessing understands only too well the paradox that even an intellect such as hers has been formed in an asymmetric, gendered society. Despite being freely accessible to several generations of readers those insights - and all they suggest, by way of analogy, for experiences of race and class - may still be incompletely owned. That they are still regarded in some quarters as being "heavy-going" or "difficult" is something on which we would do well to reflect.